Get shirts, prints, throw pillows, and cellphone and iPad cases on my RedBubble

You can also check out my nifty shop page which has direct links to my Inkster shirts! Why have shirts on two different sites? Well, RedBubble offers more color options for you, the shitstick customer, but Inkster offers cheaper shirts. So it's up to you, shitsticks my friends!

Y'know, I've always struggled with self promotion. Like, I want this to be my full time gig; I want to be one of those lucky few who make content that people love and somehow their bank account isn't empty at the same time. I don't claim to know *how* to do that BUT I do know it definitely involves at least some amount of self promotion to get your name out there and direct people to those areas which bring in those big bucks. For me, at the moment, the only way the site is going to make money is if people are buying shirts, comics, etc. but to even make people AWARE I offer such merchandise means I have to be constantly bombarding my audience with reminders and that makes me uncomfortable. You guys so graciously come to my site to view my stupid fucking comics (to which I thank you), not to have products pushed on you. Unfortunately I'm not Penny-Arcade big yet so I can't just put up a link on my site and expect a million people to immediately go to it without sending up the signal flares.

I mentioned that the only way I make money is by selling merch, so you may be asking yourself why? Look around you. Notice anything? No ads. Yep, whitelist me on your Ad Block Plus, still no ads. I'm not a big player in the online comic industry or nothin' but I sometimes get a respectable number of pageviews, especially when I'm featured on reddit or Imgur, so having ads could be a big help. "Why don't you do it, Jhall? Too much pride? You don't want to cheapen the experience for your audience, turning your website into a billboard for women's sanitary products and straight-to-video movies?" No. The real reason is I got banned from GoogleAds when we first launched and haven't really found another ad service to implement yet. But since you asked, I am actually looking to put ads on the site. Every time I get a surge in pageviews when linked on another site I look at my site analystics and go "that could have been X amount of dollars..." and then look at my bank account, and then continue eating my ramen and sadness dinner.

While looking for ad services to use, and after being rejected by a few, I've come to this conclusion: fuck GoogleAds. You know why? Because they were the best! They pay the most, they use relevant ads instead of having every adspace on your site filled with Viagra and University of Pheonix graphics, and they had an easy to use admin interface. HOWEVER, they have ZERO customer service and they will 1) ban you for a myriad of reasons, 2) put their ad clients above you in every instance, 3) NOT TELL YOU WHY YOU WERE BANNED, 4) make it virtually impossible to get unbanned if you believe it was a mistake, 5) keep your site banned forever. We had GoogleAds for like 3 weeks back when the site looked like a Geocities site some colorblind 4th grader made, and all of a sudden they were gone; I emailed Google and got an auto response with a few reasons why I could have been banned and that was it. Our hypothesis is that either since I had a bit of a following prior to launching we had a surge in pageviews at the very beginning which looked suspicious, or I may have said something somewhere on the site alluding to the fact that if you click on my ads I get money (because that's apparently a big secret that no one is supposed to know). There's also the possibility that one or a few people clicked on ads way more than what would be viewed as "organic" traffic, either purposefully to get me banned or with the intention of helping me get money. EITHER way, that was it. Did you know that you can't talk to a human over at GoogleAds? There's not even a telephone number. There's a number for Google AdWords (the ads that are hyperlinks attached to text on a site [I refuse to use those because they are way more annoying and bullshit than normal ads]) but if you call them about GoogleAds they give you the run around and send you off in a maze of phone directories that ultimately ends with a robot telling you to email Google - which, as I covered earlier, ends with another robot telling you to fuck off.

Listen, Google has their reasons for doing this; they want to protect their business with the ad providers, and they probably get inundated with calls and emails from people who were banned for legitimate reasons all the time. BUT, and this is important, FUCK THEM.

Ahem. Ok that's out of my system.

BACK TO THE POINT

SELF PROMOTION! Here's my problem with it; it's not just that I don't want to beat my audience over the head with my wares like my site is a spice market in Bangladesh, but mainly if you try to self promote on a site like reddit or Imgur you will get told to roll your merch up into a tight ball and shove it up your ass. People hate being sold things! I know I do. If your website, shirt your selling, etc. end up being shared by some random fan then it's usually kosher but if it's YOU, the content creator, going "hey I made this :)" then bend over and prepare to be fucked by the angry dick of the internet. Now, this is usually the case when you're like me and you just make art and stuff and want people to buy it because you think maybe someone out there would want to if only they knew it existed, BUT you can avoid the butt-pounding if you attach a sob story to your identity.

How many times has someone gotten the support of a huge online community when they are selling really awful, terrible shit just because they start off their pitch with something like "After the accident I didn't think I'd ever be happy again but learning how to use Photoshop has given me blah blah blah BUY THESE SHIRTS WITH A CRUDELY CUT AND PASTED CAT ON THEM." For fuck's sake that guy is a millionaire now, meanwhile I'm sitting here like "if I upload another comic to reddit I may be labled a spammer.. wat do???"

I can't complain though. Things are on the upswing; my site is getting more traffic every day, I'm getting more random people online telling me they are fans, CollegeHumor contacted me to draw shit for them, troll comments are few and far between. It makes it all worth it when someone tells me they like the comics I create. It's the whole reason I do this.